So here's the bottom line; the Desktop Effects stop working on KDE 4.5 and 4.6 when I change ANY of the advanced settings. For instance, I have always turned off Direct Rendering in previous versions of KDE because I get graphical problems. This hasn't been a problem until KDE 4.5 and 4.6, where if I turn off Direct Draw, it flashes, I hit Accept Configuration, while it says KWin has crashed twice. Afterwards, there are no desktop effects. If I try to change any of the settings from then on, it pops up a window that says:

Failed to activate desktop effects with
the given configuration options. Settings
will be reverted to their previous values.

Check your X configuration. You may also
consider changing advanced options,
especially the compositing type.

If I open Konsole, and type

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sudo systemsettings

then change any of the Advanced settings, (such as Use Vsync) go back to the system settings that I didn't give elevated privileges, turn off or on any of the desktop effects, and hit apply; it will reload and the desktop effects will be running (for a while anyways).

The only thing I can think of is that somewhere, a file for the X configuration or a file that the desktop effects depend on, got set to Read-Only or is now owned solely by Root. (I've had something similar with the first few releases of KDE 4.x, in which a file lost it's privileges and KDE wouldn't log in.)
Help???? I really LOVE KDE and I would appreciate it if it didn't break when I tried to use it

Please run the following to verify configuration directory ownership:

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find $(kde4-config --localprefix) ~/.local/ ~/.config ! -user $(id -un)

If it outputs nothing, everything is fine. If it outputs something, please post it here.

bcooksley wrote:Please run the following to verify configuration directory ownership:

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find $(kde4-config --localprefix) ~/.local/ ~/.config ! -user $(id -un)

If it outputs nothing, everything is fine. If it outputs something, please post it here.

I did what you said and it the output read as:

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/home/tanner/.kde/share/config/.swp.kwinrc

Assuming you do not have vi/vim running as root, editing that file, run the following as root:

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rm /home/tanner/.kde/share/config/.swp.kwinrc

However I doubt this could be the cause of the issue. What graphics card do you have? It is a known bug that compositing freezes when changing KWin related settings, but suspending them and resuming it fixes this.

bcooksley wrote:Assuming you do not have vi/vim running as root, editing that file, run the following as root:

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rm /home/tanner/.kde/share/config/.swp.kwinrc

However I doubt this could be the cause of the issue. What graphics card do you have? It is a known bug that compositing freezes when changing KWin related settings, but suspending them and resuming it fixes this.

I removed the file and tried changing advanced settings again and the effects died like expected I've been discussing this on the Linux Mint Forums as well http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=109&t=67847 and someone told me to put this into a terminal to restore the effects back to normal:

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kquitapp kwin
sleep 5s
rm $(kde4-config --localprefix)/share/config/kwinrc
kwin --replace &

It works, and all the Desktop Effects settings reset, and they work again, but if I change anything, they break again. The main thing I'm trying to do is disable Direct Rendering (which never used to be enabled by default until KDE 4.5; the same release that started doing all this). With it enabled, graphics always run slowly and the screen almost never refreshes. For instance, if I right-click and Direct Rendering is enabled, I can't the see the menu, only the shadow of the menu. (there's a lot of other graphic flaws while it's enabled as well.)
I have an Intel Mobile 965 Chipset gfx card with 256mb a video ram.

You can set LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 as environment variable (in scripts run before KDE starts), and KWin will disable direct rendering.